A Study of the Effectiveness of Selected Registration Data on Predicting Student Success in the Beginning Speech Course. Final Report.

Alusow, Frank T.

Increasing student enrollment at a state university, the nature of the introductory speech course, the fact that it is required of nearly all students for graduation, and the strain on the administrative budget to employ additional teachers to accommodate the rapidly increasing numbers of students led to this study to devise ways to help solve this perplexity. The data on the records of nearly all the students who took Speech 1 in the first semester of 1967-68 formed the basis of this study. The focus of this project was upon the interrelationship of various variables and the grades earned in Speech 1. Two-way contingency tables and chi-square analyses were used to determine the nature of the interdependence of the variables in reference to grades earned in Speech 1. The total population analyzed was 709. It was concluded that, in general, 28% of the population studied may be selected for special processing. (CK)